Try to Get Off Your Phone — A 16-Year Old Girl (by Danielle Steinbach)

By Danielle Steinbach

When I tell people my age that I don’t have social media, I occasionally receive looks of surprise.

“No Instagram?”

“No.”

“Snapchat?”

“No.”

“TikTok?”

“No.”

When people ask me why, I tell them my parents don’t allow it. The truth is I just don’t want it. I don’t see the appeal of it. In fact, I worry about what would happen to me if I had it. 

I think that social media has taken a lot away from a lot of people, particularly the most vulnerable of our population – children and adolescents. 

I could tell you that this substance increases risk of depression, anxiety, eating disorders, shortens attention span, impairs memory, and alters frontal lobe brain activity. I could tell you that once you start using it, it’s very difficult to stop. I could tell you that this substance on average will drain 1,300 hours from each precious year of your life.   

The frightening thing, however, is not that most people are unaware of this. The frightening thing is that most people are aware of this. And still, despite all of this, they still use social media for hours every day. That is the nature of addiction, I suppose – to continue doing something even knowing how destructive it is. 

And the more that you use an addictive substance, the harder it is to withdraw from it. And this brings me to my ultimate recommendation to teenagers – don’t start the addiction now, while your brain is most impressionable and still in the earlier stages of developing reward pathways and reasoning skills. If possible, I would refuse to use social media, at least as an adolescent. 

Now, I don’t mean to be extreme and say social media is purely poison that should be avoided at all costs. I’m not naive to the fact that many people use social media for marketing businesses, to seek out job opportunities, to fundraise for causes they find meaningful, and more. I understand that. But if possible, parents, if you don’t want to completely ban your kids from social media, I would recommend at least limiting their use to it for the listed productive reasons – I would recommend demanding to know everything your kids are using social media for, how long they are using social media, and who they are interacting with on social media. 

Because social media physically changes the brain. You might say that’s exaggerated, that spending one hour on social media is fine and won’t rot your neurons. And you’re right – one hour here and there on social media probably won’t cause long-lasting, significant damage to your brain. But that’s assuming it’s just one hour here and there. What about two or three or five hours here and there? What about two or three or five hours every day? The dangerous thing about social media is that it’s insidious like that – it’s something that, if it can be done in moderation, isn’t particularly dangerous. The trouble is that social media has been engineered to be extremely difficult to use in moderation. 

Through years, social media changes your brain to become dependent on it, and so many people – so many young kids – do. From the chemical signaling in your nucleus accumbens to the patterns of activity in your frontal lobe, social media alters the course of an adolescent’s brain development to such an extent that it can be very difficult to reverse the damage. 

MRI studies have revealed that using more than one form of social media has been correlated to a statistically significant degree with decline in volume of the anterior cingulate cortex (ACC), a key area involved in self-reflection and decision-making. One possible hypothesis for the correlation between social media usage and the decline in brain volume is that neurons only survive in the developing brain when they receive sufficient trophic factors to sustain growth. The brain only diverts these precious resources to neurons that are deemed essential through continuous stimulation. It’s entirely possible that, with social media, teenagers exercise their decision-making skills less frequently, with all of their behaviors and attitudes simply mimicking what other people display on social media. How can you activate the neural networks responsible for self-reflection and personal decision-making when you are encouraged to simply conform to the trends shown online? When you follow an online template of what you should be, your brain deems the part of itself that makes independent decisions, that allows you to think for yourself, to be ‘nonessential’. But it’s not only the volume of the ACC that suffers. The individual parts of the brain do not operate in isolation – white matter connections exist everywhere in the brain to create highways of information processing. The use of social media has been correlated with a decline in connectivity between the precuneus in the parietal lobe and the anterior cingulate cortex, which suggests an impaired ability to recall and reflect on one’s past experiences and direct one’s focus at specific tasks. The breakdown of these connections is a startling phenomenon given that this is occurring on the scale of a generation of adolescents. 

However, perhaps the most concerning change that occurs in the brain occurs in the prefrontal cortex. Neuronal decline in the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex foreshadows a drop in executive function and exacerbates a decline in the ability to make plans and decisions. This region of the brain, often the last to fully develop, is arguably the most sensitive to social media. When you become reliant on likeability and popularity online, your world and your decisions become narrowed down to what other people think of you, rather than what you think of yourself. 

However, social media doesn’t just act at the macro-structural level – it changes the chemical dynamics of your brain, particularly by disrupting the cycles of release of a specific neurotransmitter – dopamine. Growing children and adolescents seek reward; they want to know what they should do to get social acceptance, to be liked by people online who they may not even know but whose opinions matter so much to them. When the nucleus accumbens becomes continuously rewarded and stimulated with dopamine in response to social media validation and scrolling online, it becomes very difficult to train your brain to become less reliant on that surge of dopamine. Social media engineers the reward system of adolescents to make them base their sense of self-worth on comparisons to others and the opinions of people online. 

And so I would caution any adolescents against using social media if possible. It is designed to change your brain so you will become a little less like yourself every day and a little more like whatever happens to be online. I would encourage you to remember that there’s so much more to what your life could be than watching what other people’s lives appear to be online. 

References: 

“Average Time Spent On Social Media: The Latest Numbers.” BusinessDasher, 4 Nov. 2024, www.businessdasher.com/average-time-spent-on-social-media/#:~:text=Average%20Time%20Spent%20On%20Social%20Media%20in,2.5%20hours%20per%20day%20using%20social%20platforms. Accessed 15 July 2025.

Katella, Kathy. “How Social Media Affects Your Teen's Mental Health: A Parent's Guide.” Yale Medicine, 17 June 2024, www.yalemedicine.org/news/social-media-teen-mental-health-a-parents-guide. Accessed 15 July 2025.

Loh, Kep Kee, and Ryota Kanai. “Higher Media Multi-Tasking Activity Is Associated with Smaller Gray-Matter Density in the Anterior Cingulate Cortex.” PLoS ONE, vol. 9, no. 9, 24 Sept. 2014, p. e106698, https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0106698.

Shanmugasundaram, Mathura, and Arunkumar Tamilarasu. “The Impact of Digital Technology, Social Media, and Artificial Intelligence on Cognitive Functions: A Review.” Frontiers in Cognition, vol. 2, 24 Nov. 2023, https://doi.org/10.3389/fcogn.2023.1203077.

“Social media's impact on our mental health and tips to use it safely.” UC Davis Health, 10 May 2024, health.ucdavis.edu/blog/cultivating-health/social-medias-impact-our-mental-health-and-tips-to-use-it-safely/2024/05. Accessed 15 July 2025.